Spatio-Temporal Data Fusion for Massive Sea Surface Temperature Data from MODIS and AMSR-E Instruments

TL;DR

This paper introduces a scalable spatio-temporal data fusion model, DFGP, for massive satellite sea surface temperature datasets, enabling efficient inference and integration of multi-instrument remote sensing data.

Contribution

The paper develops a dynamic fused Gaussian process model that efficiently combines large-scale satellite data with different resolutions and error characteristics.

Findings

Successfully fused 3.7 million SST datasets from MODIS and AMSR-E

Enabled fast filtering and smoothing for massive spatio-temporal data

Demonstrated scalability with a stochastic EM algorithm

Abstract

Remote sensing data have been widely used to study various geophysical processes. With the advances in remote-sensing technology, massive amount of remote sensing data are collected in space over time. Different satellite instruments typically have different footprints, measurement-error characteristics, and data coverages. To combine datasets from different satellite instruments, we propose a dynamic fused Gaussian process (DFGP) model that enables fast statistical inference such as filtering and smoothing for massive spatio-temporal datasets in a data-fusion context. Based upon a spatio-temporal-random-effects model, the DFGP methodology represents the underlying true process with two components: a linear combination of a small number of basis functions and random coefficients with a general covariance matrix, together with a linear combination of a large number of basis functions and Markov random coefficients. To model the underlying geophysical process at different spatial resolutions, we rely on the change-of-support property, which also allows efficient computations in the DFGP model. To estimate model parameters, we devise a computationally efficient stochastic expectation-maximization (SEM) algorithm to ensure its scalability for massive datasets. The DFGP model is applied to a total of 3.7 million sea surface temperature datasets in the tropical Pacific Ocean for a one-week time period in 2010 from MODIS and AMSR-E instruments.